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Stranded on the Subway, Some Through the Night

Around 9 p.m. on Sunday, Grigoriy Zilbergleyz, 64, bid farewell to a friend he was visiting on the Upper West Side of Manhattan and began his journey home to Bensonhurst, Brooklyn. He hopped on a C train, transferred to a D and was riding on an aboveground N when he called his wife around 10:55 to let her know that he was only three stations away.

“ ‘In five minutes, I will be home,’ ” Mr. Zilbergleyz recalled saying. He allowed a rueful laugh. “And after that, I only came home after 15 hours.”

Mr. Zilbergleyz’s train stalled at the New Utrecht Avenue station, paralyzed by a snow-clogged third rail, its propulsion and heating systems rendered useless. Its passengers, huddling in winter jackets, waited all night for a rescue train that never came.

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Subway riders waited on a train that was stranded for eight hours near Kennedy International Airport in New York on Monday.Credit
Christopher Mullen/NY1, via Associated Press

It was a situation that seemed stolen from the nightmares of many subway-dependent New Yorkers — and it played out across Queens and Brooklyn early Monday. Officials at New York City Transit said they could not provide an exact count of stranded trains, but a spokesman said there were at least four episodes on the A line in the Rockaways and five stalled N trains in southern Brooklyn. Trains on the D and No. 7 lines were also affected.

Snowdrifts up to four feet high saturated the electrified third rail on some stretches of outdoor track, officials said, making it difficult to dispatch rescue crews to the stranded trains. And with many roads unplowed, shuttling passengers by bus was not an option. So they waited. Some were luckier than others: those stalled at a station platform could at least exit the train for periodic exercise, cigarettes or bathroom breaks.

Mr. Zilbergleyz eventually left the train and walked home, arriving around noon on Monday. “Every time when I see the situation like this, I’m very proud of the American people,” said Mr. Zilbergleyz, who immigrated to New York 11 years ago from Belarus. “No panic, no yelling. Just understanding.”

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Newark Liberty International Airport was shut down because of high winds and two feet of snow.Credit
Richard Perry/The New York Times

What would have happened back home? He laughed. “I don’t know, a lot of not very good words,” he said. “And they will complain about government, about driver, about his mother, and so what and so on.”

When the D train that Margie Chen was riding stalled in a tunnel near 36th Street in Brooklyn around 11 p.m. on Sunday, she initially believed the conductor’s announcement of a signal malfunction. But then the train sat for two hours. It finally moved again, inching into the Ninth Avenue station, where it stayed until sunrise.

“The longer we waited, the less messages came in” from the conductor, recalled Ms. Chen, who is 19. There was no bathroom at the station, so passengers had to improvise. “You know those wooden construction panels?” Ms. Chen asked. “They went behind there and did their business.” She described the experience as dispiriting. “Every time they turned the heat on,” she said, “it seemed like they started the train again, and you’d think it would move. You would see on people’s faces — we would sit up a little more — ‘Yeah, we’re moving’ — and then we didn’t move. It happened a lot.”

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On Manhattan Avenue just north of 106th street, as in many other parts of New York, Metropolitan Transportation Authority buses were abandoned after getting stuck.Credit
Ozier Muhammad/The New York Times

Around the same time, 1 a.m., Johnny Gedeon, 23, was heading home to Brooklyn from his job at Kennedy Airport. He boarded an A train at the Aqueduct North Conduit Avenue station in Queens, and dozed off. He woke up three hours later. “So I’m like, oh my God, I hope I didn’t miss my stop,” Mr. Gedeon recalled. “I ask the guy next to me: ‘Where are we’? He looks at me and goes: ‘Are you serious? We never made it to the next stop.’ ”

The train did not move until 7:52 a.m. Its 400 passengers had to contend with teasing announcements from conductors about a rescue train that never arrived and a total lack of bathroom access. One passenger, Mr. Gedeon said, began talking about cannibalism. Others turned their anger on the conductor, who eventually disappeared into her vestibule, saying, by Mr. Gedeon’s account, “I am not going to get beat up on the day after Christmas at work.”

A 31-year-old female passenger was treated for exposure at a Brooklyn hospital after being removed from a stranded train around 3 a.m. The patient was treated and released.

A version of this article appears in print on December 28, 2010, on Page A21 of the New York edition with the headline: Stranded on the Subway, Some Through the Night. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe